AUGUSTA – It’s good that environmental groups and large timberland owners are fighting over which forest certification system is better, Gov. Angus King said Tuesday. The sparring means that certification, where a company’s forest practices are reviewed by auditors and given a stamp of approval, has become widely accepted in the state.

Five years ago, certification was in its infancy and the public was clamoring for better regulation of the forest industry. Today, certification has taken hold and the public outcry has diminished, King said.

The fact that 200 people attended a certification conference in Augusta Tuesday rather than gather signatures for a petition calling for changes to forestry regulations was indicative of this change in attitude, the governor said.

Maine has the largest percentage of certified forestland of any state, with more than 6 million acres included in some type of review system.

The two major systems are the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, a program started by the American Forest and Paper Association, an industry group, and the Forest Stewardship Council, an international group made up of environmentalists and landowners.

Many environmental groups in Maine prefer the FSC system because they say it has tougher standards and requires that audits be done by independent third parties, and that results be made available to the public.

All AF&PA members must participate in the SFI program, but they can choose not to undergo a third party audit.

In the U.S. and Canada, 110 million acres of land are enrolled in the SFI program, but only 50 million acres have been reviewed by third party certifiers.

In the U.S., 8.5 million acres of land have been certified as well managed by FSC, the standard preferred by building store giant Home Depot.

While steering clear of the debate over the two systems, King told conference attendees that if the public is to have confidence in certification, the reviews must be done by independent third parties.

A major advantage of certification, King said, is that it takes the state out of the business of monitoring every detail of forest management. Rather than the state monitoring cutting operations to ensure harvests are far enough from streams, the auditors will ensure that this is the case.

“We don’t have to have a cop on every skidder,” he said.

While companies that have undergone certification reviews say the scrutiny has improved their practices, a major stumbling block to vast acceptance of the reviews remains the fact that companies are not able to charge more for wood that comes from certified forests.

John McNulty, vice president of Seven Islands Land Co., the only Maine company to have all of its holdings certified by the FSC, said one reason it chose the review was so that it could take advantage of “green markets” for wood that it assumed would materialize. “I can tell you now it doesn’t exist,” he said.

While stores like Home Depot expected consumers to begin demanding the so-called “green certified” wood, it failed to occur.

There are markets for FSC-certified wood in Europe, said Peter Miles of Northland Forest Products, a company that exports expensive high quality wood overseas. However, the market has not grown as much as his company expected, Miles said.

FSC and SFI representatives pitched their respective systems to the foresters, land owners, politicians, environmentalists and bureaucrats who attended the conference that was put on by the Maine Forest Products Council, Maine Audubon, Maine TREE, Maine Department of Conservation, University of Maine and College of the Atlantic.

Hank Cauley, executive director of the Forest Stewardship Council of the United States, said his group would clear up embarrassing problems like FSC member Sierra Club of Canada’s appeal of the certification of timberlands owned by Irving Woodlands in northern Maine. While the appeal has not been handled in a timely manner, it does show that FSC operates as a democracy and that there are avenues for expressing contrary opinions, he said.

Michael Virga, director of SFI at the AF&PA, said his program had moved away from its industry beginnings, and is now run by a board that includes landowners, public officials and conservation groups.

Mimicking FSC which has long had a single logo to be used by all companies around the globe that grow, produce and sell certified wood, SFI plans to launch its own logo and a consumer awareness campaign early next year.